After letting this self-doubt dissipate, a new emotion settled in: anger. FizzBuzz is a way to filter out fake programmers. I am fully aware that I am not a programmer, at least “programmer” in the sense of algorithms, data modeling, etc.

Who is writing these descriptions? I’m sure these companies find a perfect match now and again. But I have a feeling that’s not the norm. It’s more likely that many of these companies just don’t know what they need so they look for everything. A recruiter or HR person whips something up and puts it out there to see who bites. Maybe they’ll catch a unicorn!

What’s more, based on my (albeit minimal) job application experience, who knows what will happen in the interview? I imagine you’d talk to a real designer or developer with a much better idea of the situation, and who knows how well that matches the job description, let alone the interviewee’s skillset?

Again I started talking through it, but it was impossible for me to figure it out with someone watching. I needed to do some serious Googling. He said I could email back my solutions. I toyed with the idea of calling up and saying, “forget it, this isn’t for me” but I decided to stick it out. After spending a few hours coming up with something that semi-worked, I found the solution on StackOverflow and, in my honesty, linked to it in the code.

Unsurprisingly, a few days after I sent my solutions I got a “you don’t have enough experience for the position, but we’d like to keep your resume on file”. In my impostor-prone state, I felt called out as a just-good-at-Googling-and-maybe-jQuery developer. I was embarrassed.

Me: (OMG MATH. I tried to talk through it a bit, but then said:)

Me: Ok, again to be honest, my JS knowledge is more regarding UI/UX based tasks. And I don’t really understand the point of the question. Like, what’s the use case? When would this come up in the role?

(Only after recounting this interaction to a friend did I realize you should not ask “why are you asking me this?” in a job interview.)

Interviewer: Well, it’s an exercise in programmatic thinking. No worries, let’s move on to the next question. Write a function that takes a timecode string and turns it into seconds.

When it came time for a technical interview with the lead developer, I felt pretty confident. Except for JavaScript “engineering” and anything related to algorithms, my technical skills are sharp. We begin with a great talk about style guides, Sass, the designer/developer phenomenon, atomic design, content, all those awesome things that get me super stoked. Then came the coding portion. I was anticipating questions about nitty-gritty positioning, semantics, maybe some UI based JS stuff, and development workflow. The first question was:

Interviewer: Are you familiar with FizzBuzz?

Me: Um, to be honest, no.

Interviewer: Ok, well, you have to write a program where multiples of three print ‘Fizz’ instead of the number and for the multiples of five print ‘Buzz’. For numbers which are multiples of both three and five print ‘FizzBuzz’. So it would look like ‘1, 2, Fizz, 4, Buzz, Fizz, 7, 8, Fizz, Buzz, 11, Fizz, 13, 14, Fizz Buzz’

@100110111 Turned out my answer really annoyed the interviewer.

Nothing happens by magic. If there isn't enough time or resources to find a true solution, find a workaround. Otherwise, troubleshoot, fix. Use whatever resources are available and suitable.

"But what if you can't figure it out?"

No big deal. I need to learn something new to fix it. Learn, fix, move on.

The 'right' answer was to ask for help. I get that. But the vast majority of the time when I've gotten stumped in my specialty, there's nobody else in the organization who can figure it out either. That's why I get handed those problems in the first place with a hearty handshake and "Good luck!".

Worked out well enough. Ended up calling him when I needed to sub out some of my work a few years later.